Bishop Hill Royal Society openness meeting
Jun 8, 2011 FOI Royal Society Cameron Neylon is tweeting from today's ROyal Society meeting on "Science as a public enterprise". A couple of BH readers are there, so I hope to get some more detailed reports of what was said too.
Here are some highlights from the twitterers
"The focus on publication - of paper and data - is too narrow."- William Dotton, OII
Emmott: Open Science not a movement, just getting back to the scientific method
It's quite something to open your question with the statement, "I'm going to start by correcting something Sir Paul Nurse said"
mtg is heating up... Arguments about goodies and baddies in climategate... Oo er
I think "I used to run the Met Office" is probably the coolest start to a question from the floor that we will see today
From floor: "if RS only focusses on data...risk losing public trust...must also focus on the code in the computer" #openscience
Reader Comments (60)
So far, it seems to me, we have been considering Sir Paul as the head of a respected scientific institution. But we know the Royal Society has for a large part of its existence been home to a clique of scientific conservatives who have often gone out of their way to keep out those with revolutionary ideas.
Now suppose we look at the RS as the scientists' Trade Union and Sir Paul as the chief shop steward ...
How does that play?
Richard
Thanks for the reply - good points, well made. You could say, perhaps, that if science were done properly, there would be no need for FoI in the first place. I can see why politicians are jumpy about it, but I can see babies being thrown out with bathwater here - I bet if FoI were repealed, there would be loud cheers from all the wrong people!
Even if all FoI did was to make it a bit more difficult for the bastards to conspire against us it would still be worth that.
James
Cameron Neylon said exactly that in the panel session on Wednesday. "If it gets to FoI then we've all failed." Later, under questioning, probably from Doug, he clarified that he meant that the producers of science data and code had failed, not the person forced to use FoI to prise it out of them. The fact that this was said so clearly - with a great deal of sympathy from the audience I would say - was one of the many good things about the meeting on Wednesday. And it's the reason we should listen carefully to Cameron's view on FoI communicated to me over biscuit, if not tea, at the end.
As for FoI being repealed, I don't think there's any chance of a government doing that, any more than I expect the National Lottery to be disbanded. What I think will happen is that the Royal Society will ask for the law to be changed for scientists. I think we should oppose that. But I'm not an enthusiast, just as I don't like the amount of money from the less well off that goes into the lottery every week, where much richer people decide on what worthy causes it shall be used.
Tony Blair showed rare honesty for a politician in writing "what were we thinking?" in his memoirs about FoI. John Major never did the same about the Lottery. I know which of those two I prefer and which I learned from.
Thanks again, Richard. I don't think Tony Blair's reservations were the result of concerns like yours, though.
Agree with you about the 'rare honesty' - a rare slip of the mask, perhaps!
James, thanks. I'm about as much an admirer of Blair as Michael Gove is - in other words, quite a lot. But we can differ on that and on all kinds of things. There is a terrible blind spot over the bad science in the AGW camp and that is vastly important. The situation could not have been sustained without gross lack of the kind of openness that is the sine qua non of science, way before FoI comes anywhere near the picture. (I told Cameron Neylon about the hockey stick guys not allowing anyone to see their adverse verification stats and he grimaced. There was a lot going on on Wednesday.) Blair has been taken in. I often wonder about Gove. It matters. A priviledge to be in the trenches with you on it, in any case :)
An addendum, so that all my notes about the Royal Society event on Wednesday are in the same place. This seemed another important piece of the puzzle learned from Dr. Neylon, put up on Climate Audit early this morning London time in response to some rules of thumb from Pat Frank for weeding out the dross in scientific papers. The post was originally rejected by Steve's WordPress automatic spam filter, presumably because of the phrase 'right-wing', though possibly because of its converse, 'George Soros'. I recommend taking in Pat's original as well.
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But Smith still gets published and it’s the number of published articles, is it not, that is the key metric in the evaluation of scientists, leading to such little matters as whether they get the next grant or go out of business?
Isn’t that just a little bit unhelpful?
Cameron Neylon, the biophysicist and open science guru, was telling me on Wednesday about one of his current projects, on evaluation – how the evaluation of scientists has to be transformed to take account of the greater goods of openness. At the moment, as he explained on the second panel of the Royal Society do at the Festival Hall, if it’s a choice between writing up your work in three months to get published in Nature (the editor was right there on the panel) or cleaning up your code, your data and your metadata to make them useful to the wider community, there is no incentive at all to do the latter.
I wondered whose smart money was going into such an important topic. Some of the more right-wing CA readers will be delighted to learn that it’s George Soros’ Open Society Institute that’s funding Neylon on this. Well, good on them.
Nusre has NOT been decieved..
James Delingpole gave him chapter and verse about why the inquirioes were useless, and many of the other issues..
Paul Nurse, just faded to voice over, and does not present the arguments, let alone discuss them..
Richard you give him way to much credit.
look at the 'Hide the decline' issue he stood shoulder to shoulder with Phil Jones,
what of Paul Dennis', Professor Jonathon Jones, and Professor Judith Curry and Professor Richard Muller's thoughts on 'Hide the Deccline'. In response to that Horizon Program.
He choose to be in a program, specifically deisgned to linlk AIDS deniers with climate scepticism...
I think him intelectually dishonest.
Barry, I respect your point of view, as I do the others that have posted along similar lines. How many have posted along a similar line to me? Well, Doug also met the guy, I assume for the first time, like me, on Wednesday and thought he might well honestly believe what he was saying. I remember being extremely helped by your account of a long personal conversation you once had with John Houghton. I think the face to face testimony is important. Of course we can misread people, even in person. But I thought it was important to give people the benefit of what I felt.
For me the interactions of Wednesday that mattered the most were about DDT and malaria. I found it striking that I chose to spend all the time in the first interval with someone expert in that area - and greatly enjoyed it, though the young researcher concerned was not anything like as big a name as many others in the room - then went to the Gents and when I came out there was Dr. Nurse with one colleague, all by themselves. At that point I couldn't stop myself. It was totally unplanned and that's perhaps the best setting in which to judge the character of someone else.
Being deceived and being deceptive are not mutually exclusive of course. But, despite all that happened to poor old James Delingpole, I think Nurse is the former but not, in the main, the latter. I could be wrong. In fact I think that happened once before but my memory's getting so bad ... :)
Yes, but will we ever witness a serious discussion of "Science as a Public Nuisance"? :)